[MonoDevelop] Questions regarding MonoDevelop

Michael Hutchinson m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com
Wed Dec 9 01:04:25 EST 2009


On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 1:52 AM, Davyd McColl <davydm at gmail.com> wrote:
> Good day
>
> I've been watching MonoDevelop for a while now. It has *so* many features
> which are just fantastic -- I would love to use it instead of VS.
>
> I just have two questions which I'm unable to answer for myself when
> googling and trawling the MonoDevelop site. Perhaps I'm missing the obvious,
> but I would appreciate any input.
>
> I downloaded the latest beta (2.2b2) to check out the "latest and greatest".
> The IDE itself seems fantastic, I'm just unable to open existing .vcproj
> files. Now, I'm more of a native c++ dev than a .net dev, so the support for
> native c++ in MonoDevelop really piques my interest -- however, if I can't
> open or at least import a .vcproj, I'm afraid I can't switch: I work in a
> team environment where others will continue to use VS2008 so I have to make
> sure that I'm not rocking the boat (too much (: ).
>
> When I try to open a .sln which references .vcproj files, I get one message
> per project, of the form:
>
> <solution name>: Unsupported or unrecognized project: <project name>
>
> If I try to open the project directly, I have to enable "all files" in the
> file browser to be able to select a .vcproj and then the project is launched
> in VS2008, not in MonoDevelop.
>
> Now, from what I've read online, I *should* be able to open VS2008 projects
> -- or am I just imagining things? I've done a very simple "hello
> world"-style native c++ project and it compiles nicely with my local g++
> compiler, producing valid output -- so the only thing I'm missing to be able
> to dev in MonoDevelop is being able to open my projects.... Please help (:

Unfortunately MD can't open vcproj files.

In VS2005, VS switched to a new tools-friendly project/build format
called MSBuild - for everything except C++ projects. People have been
asking them to switch to MSBuild for C/C++ projects too, and that will
happen in VS2010 (with vcxproj files), but the upshot is that MD's
support for MSBuild projects is useless for vcproj projects.

To fully support the new file format, we'd need to
* map the item types from new MSBuild-based vcxproj projects onto MD's
project model
* write an importer for existing c/c++-flavour mdproj (generic MD
MSBuild projects)
* write some xbuild tasks so that vcxproj files could be built with
mono msbuild build engine and the associated xbuild command-line tool
* add support to xbuild for some of the ,NET 4.0 MSBuild features that
vcxproj uses

We could also write an importer/converter for vcproj files, but
considering that VS2010 does that conversion to vcxproj I'm not sure
it's worth the effort.

Unfortunately we don't have anyone actively developing the C/C++ addin
right now, though we do try to ensure that it stays working.

The following explain a bit about vcxproj:
http://www.codeguru.com/columns/kate/print.php/c15857
http://blogs.msdn.com/vcblog/archive/2008/11/20/printf-hello-msbuild-n.aspx

> The other thing is that I notice there is an addin manager with support for
> online repositories. Great! Except that the repo mentioned in the addin
> manager doesn't seem to work (I get a 404) and I can't seem to find another
> that does work. If memory serves, the original repo was at:
> http://go-mono.com/md/2.1.1 (I have to do this from memory since I removed
> it and since I can't access it, I can't re-add it)
> I've also tried:
> http://go-mono.com/md to no avail.
> Once again, any assistance appreciated

We don't usually create/update the repos for unstable version numbers.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com


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